Anyone who follows me on LinkedIn knows I have a fondness for collecting titles, but my latest may be my favorite: the Fast Company Urbanist-in-Residence at URBAN-X. It requires some explaining.

URBAN-X is a startup accelerator for nascent companies with an urban bent, whether that has to do with mobility, real estate, pollution, trash, or wayfinding for the blind. The accelerator is a joint venture between SOSV — the world’s largest accelerator program with hundreds of graduating startups per year, like scratch-and-win lottery tickets — and BWM MINI, which houses the program in its Brooklyn combination restaurant/co-working/makerspace, A/D/O. Why MINI? Because BMW executives realized the Mini Cooper’s brand equity is greater than the car — hence the effort to transform it into a lifestyle brand comprised of MINI Living, MINI Fashion, and more. (Presumably, we can one day expect to live in a global MINI-branded co-living chain equipped with cars from ReachNow, BMW’s American car-sharing program.

My role is the result of a deal between Fast Company and URBAN-X to advise the startups-in-residence on the peculiarities of cities and file dispatches on their progress. (Pre-seed round startups, I’ve learned, are a lot like toddlers — they constantly grasp at the nearest, shiniest thing.) In the meantime, TechRepublic has a nice round-up of the eight startups in the current cohort, three of which have “sense” in their name.

Where The Robot Meets The RoadThe rise of Uber and advent of autonomous vehicles herald a new era in urban mobility while threatening to disrupt public transport infrastructure. How can cities reconcile these competing models while preserving the public interest?

The format of this event will be a participatory panel discussion led by our Urbanist-in-Residence Greg Lindsay, in conversation with:

• Zack Wasserman, Head of Global Business Development at Via On-Demand Transit.
• Corinne Kisner, Director of Policy and Special Projects at NACTO.
• Varun Adibhatla, Founder of ARGO and Adjunct Instructor at NYU’s CUSP.

This event is our kickoff event of our monthly URBAN-X Dialogue Series. During these events we will hold off-the-record, participatory conversations to discuss critical questions around the impact of urban technologies in our lives. We believe that dialogue is a fundamental element for understanding the complexity of our diverse personal universes, and the starting point of better solutions for a brighter urban life.